As many of you know, tonight there will be a blue moon in the sky (that’s the second full moon in the same month, for anyone who doesn’t know). The full moon will often influence people’s behavior.  It is said that Police Departments and Emergency Rooms are extra busy at that time of month.  Personally the regular full moon doesn’t seem to have any effect on me; however on those rare occasions when the blue moon shows up I do start to act just a little bit…different.

I find myself drawn to The Horseguard Valley (I’m headed there as soon as I post this).   Usually, if I get there when it’s still light out, I like to just sit and watch the Blue Beavers frolic and listen to the song of the  Blue Footed Boobies and maybe even do some fishing for the Blue Pike (always catch and release).  However, once the blue moon rises I really cut loose.  I’ll just run around like some sort of wild man alternately baying, crowing and barking at the moon.

I am not fully conscious of my actions at the time, I’m just following some deep instinct.  The next morning, though, I can always recall everything like a very vivid dream.  I have, from time to time, wondered why I feel such a compulsion.  Maybe I could Google the answer, after all the internet seems to know everything.  But that will have to wait until tomorrow.  I have to go now.

I thought I’d swing by and visit my buddy Dean. I was on my way past Trochu anyways and I had a few hours to kill, so I picked up a six pack of Blue Beaver Beer at the store and drove over to Dean’s trailer.
    There was no answer at the door, so I checked around back. Sure enough, there was Dean in the garage, working away on some machine or another on his bench. “Hey, you brought beer!”
As we both opened a can, I examined his project with interest.
    “What’ve you got here, Deano? I don’t recognize any of this.”
    “Well, I know you can keep a secret. This here is what I’m going to call the internal combustion engine. Burns gasoline, produces a lot of horsepower.”
    “Where’d you get the idea for this? I didn’t know you could invent.”
    “I dunno, just came to me. Hand me that thingie over there.” He went back to his assembly, taking the occasional swig of beer. “ I scavenged most of these parts up from around town, but I had to order a couple. Turns out this company named ‘Ford’ builds all of the components I need and sells them everywhere. I got a good idea how it all fits together and I bet I’ll have my prototype working by the end of the week.”
    I watched in amazement as Dean made history. The first internal combustion engine. He was probably going to get rich on this one idea! After a while I had to go. I said goodbye and headed for home.
    For the next week I pretty much forgot about Dean and his secret project. I was pretty busy with contract negotiations between the activists and the government and I had a lot on my plate right around then. As Saturday rolled around, though, I remembered to call him up and check on his progress.
    “So what’s shakin’, Deano? Hows your engine going?”
    “Be careful what you say, I think my phone’s tapped. Just come down and take a look if you want.”
    Intrigued, I made the trek back to his house. Again, I found him out back. His usually open garage door was closed tight. Paranoia from Dean, of all people. I shook my head and went inside.
    His engine was mounted on a stand in the middle of the little building. Dean had a new stack of parts on the floor, a jumbled mess of who knew what. “Come on in, I’ll fire it up for you,” Dean said with a grin. In a few minutes he had his new motor purring loudly away. He revved it up and down for me then shut it off. The noise from it was deafening in the tiny garage.
    “That’s great, Dean. But what are you going to do with it?”
    “Well, for starters I’m going to build something to put it in. I’ve been thinking about this vehicle I want to invent. It’ll be fast and hold to the road real good. I’m going to call it a ‘Mustang’,” he proudly announced.
    Later, on my way home, I shook my head in amusement. You never know what’s going to come out of a sleepy little town like Trochu.

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A Vancouver man found something extra in his McDonald’s Big Xtra Burger on Tuesday.  When Max Ipinza bit into his burger he tasted peppermint.  He spit it out right away and then discovered there was gum in it.

"Three-quarters of the way through, I end up tasting something like peppermint, like gum, and immediately I knew something was wrong, because this is not what a typical McDonald’s burger tasted like."

Ipinza went to the hospital, fearing that he might have contracted hepatitis.  Doctors advised him to return if he developed flu-like symptoms.

McDonald’s Canada has issued a written statement saying the company has begun a thorough investigation in conjunction with health officials.  They also said they do not yet have all the facts and and they caution against jumping to conclusions.

I know that when my McDonald’s burgers don’t taste like rancid grease smeared on cardboard something is definitely wrong. I usually prefer to visit Wendell’s Burgers.  They’re the only fast food chain that cooks fresh, never frozen, burgers that are rhomboid shaped.  And because they bought out Tom Norton’s a few years ago, in many places they have the two businesses sharing the same building; so you can easily pick up your quadruple-quadruple to wash down your burger.

I was just checking out Sodeve, a blog I had never gone to before. An interesting read overall.  He had an excellent list of types of blog posts, which I will quote here. That would make this post a #2, ‘The Quoter’ variety.

    1. The SpeedLinker
          This is where you gather links to something interesting in other blogs.

     2. The Quoter
          This is when you saw other people saying good things in their blog and you rewrite it in your own blog.

    3. The Entertainer
          This is where you entertain your readers by putting hilarious video from Youtube.com

    4. The Questioner
          This is where you ask your readers a question to start a discussion. You definitely need readers to begin      with :-)

    5. The Updater
          This is where you inform your readers regarding the progress of an ongoing project. It could be report  on your own project/blog

    6. The Newsreader
          This is where you share interesting news you get from press release or newspaper

     7. The Recycler
          This is where you put your old post as new, with additional update of course

    8. The Guest Poster
          This is where you let someone else creating post in your blog.

    9. The Announcer
          This is where you announce something to your readers. DOH!

This is a great list of ideas for those of us who need a startup.  I use many of these ideas myself. But there is one type of post that is missing from this list, and it’s my favorite one! We need :

10. Create new, interesting content from scratch.
It might be rare, but it sure is worth it in my opinion. For an example, check out Captain Picard’s Journal. Now here is some original stuff! I bet you never saw that on episodes of Star Trek! And I had always thought they just parked the ship  in spacedock when the show was done……

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I was just sitting on my couch minding my own business, watching t.v. for inspiration for a new post.  All of a sudden I started hearing some unusual music.  I (reluctantly) muted the t.v. and listened more closely.  Then I realized it was the ice cream truck.  Ah, the memories that brought back.

Growing up on the farm, out in the middle of nowhere, we always looked forward to the dog days of summer.  It would be so hot and dusty that we wouldn’t even want to play.  Hide-and-go-seek is really lame when no one will leave the shade.  But then, way off in the distance we’d hear the ice cream truck coming down the long gravel road, 50 kms away from the closest town, where the houses were a half mile apart, and not all of them had children and even if they did they were most likely away on vacation.  Still the ice cream truck would show up at least once every summer.  I’m certain it must have been a very lucrative route.  To this day I still feel sorry for the kids who had to ride their bicycles 5 kms to the local "corner" store to buy their ice cream from some weird bald guy named Harold.

After I recovered from my stroll down memory lane, I realized the ice cream truck that was going by my house in real life, was now long gone.  I didn’t really mind though because I no longer eat ice cream.  It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that I read a book once that said refined carbohydrates are bad for you and I believed it.  I wish they would have a peperoni-and-cheese-stick truck that drove around the neighbourhoods in the city.  That’s the kind of junk food that I can really go for.

Even better than that would be a Blue Beaver Beer truck.  I think that’s technically illegal though.  Damn lawmaker people.

I went to work on the week-end, just like I always do,  prepared for a busy day.  But I was not prepared for everything else that occurred that day.   First thing in the morning I had two fellow employees phone in sick (or should I say "sick").  Then two others simply neglected to come to work.  The customers started lining up outside the doors 15 minutes before opening and they never stopped all day long.  Of course being four people short those of us who were there never stopped running.  We were all doing our very best to serve the customers, and fortunately the vast majority of them were understanding of the situation.  Inevitably though, we had a couple that weren’t.  The one I had to deal with was an older man who apparently felt that he was somehow more important than anyone else.  He was angry that he had to wait in line in the first place and then became more agitated when we did not immediately respond to his needs.  He was purchasing a sheet of plywood and he needed it cut.  To everyone’s dismay I discovered that our saw was not working.  Needless to say this man nearly pitched a fit when he found this out.  He said that he would be forced to go to our competitor to have his needs fulfilled.  Needless to say I had to fight the urge to say out loud, "I hope their saw doesn’t work either."  As he was leaving I overheard him remark to his wife, "That’s what I call the lost generation!"  For the life of me I can’t quite figure out what exactly that means.  Are we lost because a machine was not working?  Are we lost because I remained polite (I apologized twice) while he blew up at me?  Are we lost because (judging by the size of his mid-section) we do far more hard physical labour than him?  I just don’t know.  I ended up working 11 hours; but now that I have gotten it off my chest, I’m going to crack a couple of Blue Beavers and allow my memories of that day to become lost.

Dear Lord,

So for today, God; I’ve done all right. I haven’t gossiped,
haven’t lost my temper, haven’t been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or even indulgent.

I’m very thankful for that – But in a very short time, God, I’m going to get out of bed, and from that moment on I’m going to need a lot of help!

Amen.

The Weekend Question (from Captain Picard’s Journal)

We all remember most of the music albums we buy, but some of them are just so bad or disappointing, we never play them again, so they just gather dust. Today, TWQ (The Weekend Question) asks about those.

Which music albums have you found to be very disappointing when you played them, so that you never played them again, or very rarely?

Tim’s Answer:
There have been quite a few. That’s why I only buy individual previewed songs if I buy music at all. I don’t need all those cd’s collecting dust.
Here’s a couple that I did buy only to regret.
‘ANThology’ by Alien Ant Farm
-one good song, everything else kinda shabby. Then they played the good song one billion times on the radio until I wanted  to woof my cookies.

‘The Better Life’ by 3 Doors Down
-these guys had one really good song. It had Superman, it had kryptonite, it had pain and suffering. Guess what, the radio station played this song until I was forced to almost hate it for a while. It almost got as bad as that freakin’ Nickelback  stuff.

On a different note, here’s a few cool song titles for some country songs. I don’t know if any of these actually exist, so drop me a comment if you know where they are from.

  • I Kissed Her on the Lips, And Left Her Behind for You
  • I Don’t Want Your Body If Your Heart’s Not in It
  • The Beer I Had For Breakfast Is Comin’ Back For Lunch
  • We Used to Just Kiss on the Lips But Now It’s All Over
  • They May Put Me In Prison But They Can’t Stop My Face From Breaking Out
  • Why Do You Believe Me When I Tell You That I Love You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life?
  • He’s Been Drunk Since His Wife’s Gone Punk
  • I Wouldn’t Take Her To a Dog Fight, Cause I’m Afraid She’d Win

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A fight to the death between zombies has a few inherent problems.

Local Grocery Store Accidentally Orders Bears Instead of Pears:
Typo kills 3 Stockboys
 Story page 50

Preserve animals. Pickle a squirrel!

Everyday I beat my own previous record for number of consecutive days I’ve stayed alive.

Why is it that most nudists are people you don’t want to see naked?

Projecting empaths – You have to feel sorry for them.

Frogs have it easy.  They can eat what bugs them.

My grandfather worked in a blacksmith shop when he was a boy, and he used to tell me, when I was a little boy myself, how he had toughened himself up so he could stand the rigors of blacksmithing.
One story was how he had developed his arm and shoulder muscles. He said he would stand outside behind the house and, with a 5 pound potato sack in each hand, extend his arms straight out from his sides and hold them there as long as he could.
After awhile he tried 10 pound potato sacks, then 50 pound potato sacks and finally he got to where he could lift a 100 pound potato sack in each hand and hold his arms straight out for more than a full minute!
Next, he started putting potatoes in the sacks.

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Dear Ernie,
     I also write a blog, but some days I just don’t feel like thinking of a new post.  Any suggestions as to how I can waste my time?
                                                                                         Feeling Lazy in Invermeer

Dear Lazy I.,
     I don’t really consider it to be a "waste" of my time, however I really enjoy trivia quizzes.  There’s a really good (albeit easy) one over at Mental Floss right now.  You listen to sound-bites and match them up with the cartoon character that says them.  If you’re looking for something a bit more challenging as well as educational, you can take a vocabulary quiz at Encarta

Dear Ernie,
     I have been trying for weeks to come up with a question to ask you, but I have drawn a total blank.  Can you think of a question for me to ask you?
                                                                          Racking My Brain in Paraguay-town

Dear Brain on a Rack,
     Technically speaking you did ask me a question.  It’s similar to the way people are always starting conversations with the request, "Can I ask you a question?"  I like to respond, "Well you just did, and without permission I might add.  Therefore, this conversation is over."  So there’s a question for you to ask me, "Why do people always ask if they can can ask you a question instead of simply asking the question that they really want to ask in the first place?"